11 Laws of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is one of the main themes of Peter M. Senge's best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline, which I reviewed back on November 22, 2016. Family systems therapy - which is at the heart of my form of psychotherapy for personality disorders - is based on systems thinking, and looks at the role of the interactions of all family members over at least three generations in the genesis, triggering, and reinforcement of self-destructive behavior in individual members. 

Senge's book discusses eleven “laws” that apply to the behavior of individuals within groups who are engaged in trying to solve a variety of difficulties that affect the achievments of the group’s goals. The laws look at how a wide variety of different variables interact over the long term, and discuss the folly of efforts to try to reduce problems down to just simple relationships between only two or three variables over the short term.

In this post, I list the eleven laws from the book, with a few minor changes or additions I made to make them more relevant to problem solving specifically in dysfunctional families—as opposed to just any organization.

11 Laws of Systems Thinking.

#1: Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions." In our desire to avoid conflict, we solve problems by avoiding them. Inevitably, the problem comes right back more intensely and in an even more frightening aspect. Solution: Learning to negotiate and solve problems cooperatively in a win/win manner.

#2. The law of reversed effort: the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. Attacking the people in the system creates resistance. For example, the more you lecture children about something, the more likely they will be to keep doing whatever you are complaining about.

#3. Dysfunctional family and other problematic interpersonal group behavior gets better before it grows worse, and conversely, it grows worse before it gets better.

When we sacrifice our own needs in order to give the family or group what it seems to need, this stabilizes it over the short run, but since structural problems and ongoing shared intrapsychic conflicts are never dealt with or even addressed, this soon starts causing more problems over and over again.

Conversely, when problems are finally addressed, people often escalate their previous dysfunctional behavior in order to test whether everyone else really wants change - but if everyone sticks to their guns, the problematic behavior eventually subsides and then starts to go away altogether (except for occasional relapses which must then also be openly addressed).

#4. The easy way out usually leads back in. Quick and easy solutions often lead to weak and poorly thought out approaches that backfire. Solutions that come from a desire to avoid conflict or difficulty overlook the deep listening required to reveal the emotional core of family issues.

#5. The cure can be worse than the disease. Without thinking about ALL of the interacting variables, we often fix the wrong problem or approach the right problem inappropriately. Reactions and counter-reactions often leave us in a worse place than we where we started.

#6. Go slow to go fast. Rushing to completion leads to a lack of thoughtfulness and reversals of direction to go back and pick up missing pieces.

#7. Cause and effect are not necessarily closely related in time and space. We often assume the solution to be close to the problem, but most often, today's problems were caused by decisions made long ago but forgotten.

#8. Small changes can produce big results -- but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious. Taking the widest possible systemic view allows us to see the small changes that will have long term and beneficial outcomes.

#9. You can have your cake and eat it too -- but not at the same time. Patience is its own reward. Rushing produces compromise such as "I'll cut off my leg if you cut off yours." Taking the long view allows you to accomplish more and reap the benefits of the work.

#10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants. One must look at groups as a whole. Simply dividing people in a family or organization into separate, smaller groups will not produce the same dynamics, nor double the value. The right hand has to know what the left hand is doing.

#11. There is no blame. Perhaps the most critical of the laws of systems thinking, stopping blame eliminates the fear that turns employees or family members against you. Don't try to change people, change systems. Discover the systems problems and you can change the entire direction of a work group or family.

Unintended Consequences of Behavior: The Importance of Systems Thinking

Having been introduced to psychotherapy by psychoanalysts and, to a lesser extent, behaviorists (cognitive therapy had not yet caught on), I was very impressed when a friend of mine first introduced me to family systems theory. It taught me about the importance of feedback in interpersonal interactions. The actions of person A in a relationship do not "cause" the actions of Person B in response. Both A and B are continually affecting each other's behavior simultaneously, as each person assesses the motives and intentions of the other. A relationship evolves over the the entire time the relationship between two people exists.

People are not rats; they do not just respond to what the other persons just did, but to what they just did in relationship to everything else they have done during the history of the relationship. Additionally, we are not robotic automatons, even though most of what we do most of the time is just responding to the usual environmental cues. It is estimated by neuroscientists that about 80% of what we do during our day involves no conscious deliberation whatsoever. However, if something unexpected happens as we do that, we will then think about it.

Systems thinking is one of the main themes of Peter M. Senge's best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline, first published in 1990. The book discusses common errors business people make because of a lack of appreciation of feedback effects that take a certain amount of time before those effects become apparent. The most common examples are described using something that he calls Systems Archetypes. Understanding them is not just important in business but in all human interactions, including within family systems.

He lists ten of them. In this post, I would like to summarize just three that I think are the most relevant to the subject matter covered in this blog.

Perhaps the most famous of the archetypes is one Senge calls Shifting the Burden to the Intervener. It is the one described by the common proverb about teaching people to fish rather than giving them a fish. When a person or a group of persons is having some sort of problem that they cannot solve, they often call upon a consultant who does not tell them about general aspects of how to solve certain types of problems, but actually steps in and solves the problem. 

The next time a problem arises, the consultant is brought back to solve it. The long-term result is that the original group never learns to, or is not motivated to, solve similar problem themselves. This is the nasty side effect created by so-called helicopter parenting.

Another systems archetype is far less widely known. Senge calls it Success to the Successful. I mentioned a good example of it in my last post. It is seen in students who do poorly in school who then get diagnosed with some psychiatric disorder. 

The basic pattern is that kids in a classroom are somewhat in competition for the teacher's attention and praise. The kids who start out as attentive and well-behaved gain praise and positive attention from the teacher, while the ones who do not start out that way are seen as undeserving of praise. The teacher's negative attitude toward the latter children is observed by these students, who then start to see themselves in a negative light. 

Due to their loss of self confidence, they start to put even less effort into their schoolwork, which then feeds back into the teacher's negative view of them, which leads them to become even more discouraged, and so on. This archetype is the basis of many a case of what is commonly referred to a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

The third archetype I will mention is called Balancing Process with Delay. This occurs when a group or individual overcompensates for something in one way or another because there is a significant delay between what they have started to do and its effects. An illustrative example many of us are familiar with is a shower in which the temperature of the water responds sluggishly to changes in faucet position. 

Because the water seems to stay cold, a poor guy in the shower turns up the temperature, but nothing much seems to happen. The delay is due to the distance of the faucet from the hot water heater. So he turns it up again. If he keeps doing that, he suddenly finds himself getting burned due to a large, sudden and unexpected rise in the water temperature.

Because of delays in business, shortages of something can suddenly turn into a glut of that product, which then leads to another shortage as producers react too quickly to market conditions. In families, this may be seen in parents who had been abused as children. They try to be unlike their own parents by going to the opposite extreme and letting their child get away with murder. In response, the child starts to feel like the parent does not really care about them, because the parent seems to ignore it if they do something self-destructive like coming home intoxicated or failing in school.

When that child grows up and has a child, he or she may overcompensate back in the other direction, and become too harsh! In looking at genograms, we sometimes see entire generations going back and forth between two extremes. A generation of alcoholics begets a generation of teetotalers who beget a generation of alcoholics; a generation of workaholics begets a generation of slackers who beget a generation of workaholics, and the like.